Are you Making These Common Mistakes With Your Physical Therapy Website?

Are you Making These Common Mistakes With Your Physical Therapy Website?

While it’s true that every business out there, regardless of its size, needs a professionally executed website these days, not all businesses are created equal. The same should apply for the website representing the business. Yet, unfortunately, many healthcare business owners get carried away with the newest trends in online marketing, failing to see that some website strategies simply don’t have the same impact on patients that they do on any other type of customer.

In order to make sure that your physical therapy clinic’s website achieves an optimal effect over its visitors, first of all you should abandon your preferences for what’s visually appealing and concentrate on what your patients want to see and read instead. Failing to understand why their physical therapy patients and potential clients visit their PT clinic’s site is the number one cardinal mistake of any clinic’s owner when it comes to having the perfect website designed.

Branching out from here, a number of other healthcare website blunders emerge. Read on and check whether you are committing any of these and turning off potential patients and site visitors. Fortunately, none of the following mistakes is irreversible and is easy to fix as soon as you spot it.

Navigation nightmares – your physiotherapy clinic’s website is a maze

Think about the primary reason a person who needs physical therapy would visit your PT clinic’s website. They would either try to find relevant content in the hopes of solving their problem at home, or, if matters are serious, they would need to quickly locate the most important information – your address, telephone number and working hours. If you concentrate on large, beautiful images of happy jogging couples on your homepage, you would be making it harder for the patients who need your services urgently to contact you.

Overall, one rule applies to all websites targeting patients as customers – the simpler, the better. Making sure that your visitors have an easy way around your menus, pages and content should be your top priority with your physiotherapy clinic website.

Using Flash has recently become quite popular in the online marketing world, but the last thing a website aimed at patients is flashing, moving and distracting objects around the site. Not only is relevant content harder to spot and concentrate on with such design, but Flash adds little value to your physical therapy clinic’s site in general. After all, you are not trying to make money from random advertisements.

Font headaches – your relevant information is hard to read

One of the most annoying things for a visitor to your clinic’s website is an unreadable font. Since we already established that the main goal of a person clicking his or her way through to your site is to gain information, you better make it as easy for them to digest it as possible. Forget about flowery scripts, cursive, tiny fonts, etc. even if they look good to you. Make sure your text is as prominent as possible with an easily recognizable, easy-on-the eyes font.

Splash crashes – your PT clinic’s website is slow to load

Could splash pages be valuable for your physiotherapy clinic’s website? Despite all the hype about them, probably not. Usually these are set into place to brand your website and make it more appealing to new visitors before they have entered the official website. Keeping in mind that patients looking for a solution to a medical problem don’t particularly care about your branding strategy when they are in need and want to get to the helpful information with as fewer distractions as possible, you can safely abandon this trending marketing strategy.

We have mentioned it several times, and we will repeat it again – patients and potential visitors to your physiotherapy clinic need relevant, authoritative, well-presented and concise information on the topics that burden them. Patients are a unique breed of customers and their needs should be addressed through constructing a thoughtful content marketing plan that doesn’t fail to inform them, while establishing your clinic’s staff as the experts in the field of physical therapy.

Designing a patient-friendly website that presents your PT clinic in the best possible light and is a one-stop hub for your current and potential patients may be daunting and even confusing. If you are in doubt about whether your clinic’s website has the desired effect, reach out to us and see how we can help.